Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore is BRAVE-ly driven in the fight against crime

Updated April 17, 2017 at 2:41 PM;Posted December 11, 2013 at 9:10 AM

East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore III, who has made the BRAVE program a zealous passion in his quest to reduce violent crime in Baton Rouge, is one of the key players behind the crime prevention progam working to decrease gang activity in Baton Rouge's most violent neighborhoods. (Photo by Brianna Paciorka, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

The district attorney's phone buzzes again. He sighs, quickly picks up the smart phone and presses a button on the edge to silence it before tossing the device back on the conference table in his office.

He has a meeting down the street in a few minutes, but once Hillar Moore III starts talking about BRAVE, the nearly year-old program designed to interrupt Baton Rouge gang violence, he becomes affected by a bit of tunnel vision.

"Probably 100," the district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish answers, scoffing and springing from his chair when asked how many books he's read in the last two years on crime, respect, gang culture, policing, race, violence and murder. "But the research articles..." he trailed off and began popping off the names of authors who wrote his favorite scholarly articles - criminologists, sociologists and other academics. While talking, he marches around the conference table, grabbing stapled papers from a stack and hurriedly thumbing through the familiar pages, looking for a particular passage.

A stack of books with names like, "Don't Shoot," "The New Jim Crow," "Comeback Cities" and "The Tipping Point," serve as the centerpiece of the conference table -- a cornucopia devoted to his passion: absorbing as much information as he can about violence prevention and public safety. Yellow sticky notes fanned out from pages of some of the books, like a novel read by junior high literature students who've been assigned to mark up the motifs and symbols.

For the guy whose job is prosecuting bad guys, Moore is hell-bent on finding a way to keep them out courtrooms.

Hillar Moore on BRAVEEast Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore III talks about the importance of community buy-in to the success of the BRAVE program. (Emily Lane, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

The impetus for his research boiled down, at least initially, to logistics.

It takes more than two years on average to resolve a homicide case, Moore said. The cases were costing too much time and money.

"The goal was, we hoped, to see if we can't stop the killing to help the office in the sheer number of murders we had," Moore said.

He eventually got involved with people from the University of Cincinnati, who agreed to perform an audit of the two most recent years of the city's murders. The audit and continued research led to the introduction of the Baton Rouge Area Violence Elimination program, or BRAVE.

Moore's fascination with research leading to BRAVE strategies didn't come out of thin air.

He studied criminal justice during his undergraduate years in the 1970s at LSU, which exposed him to sociology and psychology in addition to crime scene forensics and other police work. A few years later, still at LSU, he earned 30 hours toward a master's degree studying the same topics.

"Back then, there was all kids of stuff, but it was hard to understand," he said of the research. "Everyone had a different theory about everything. None of them were proven or sustained."

While at LSU, Moore started working as an investigator for the district attorney's office, where he worked for more than a decade, including a number of years working crime scenes.

"We see really bad things," he said of the office, then and now.

Short of writing a thesis, Moore left LSU and went to law school at Southern University Law Center, graduating in 1989. He switched gears and sides of the courtroom and began defending the type of criminals he previously investigated as a partner in a firm started by Anthony Marabella, who's now a state district judge.

Once he started defending criminals, Moore said the criminology behind the criminals he sat next to fell from his mind.

"But I always wanted to come back," he said of the DA's office.

Not long after Moore took office in 2009, he got back into "all of this stuff," he said, nodding toward the table. And he hasn't stopped digging.

He absorbed the theories of Dr. Gary Slutkin, a professor of epidemiology who views violence as a disease that is fundamentally misdiagnosed. He absorbed the theories of David Kennedy, the director of a center for crime prevention and control in New York, who tied violence to gangs or groups and helped develop the ceasefire strategy, on which BRAVE is based. He absorbed the theory of Tom R. Ryler, from his paper "Why People Obey the Law," which concludes they do so only when people believe the law and the authority enforcing it is legitimate - not because they fear punishment.

Armed with information from the two-year homicide audit and his own research, he started to understand the connections between the killings.

"We had 160 bodies that had to be resolved," he said. "That's a lot."

Knowing there's a structure makes the violence contained in files that come through his office less chaotic and more manageable, he said.

"Man, I can see this a whole lot clearer now that I'm on the chess board here at the bottom," Moore said.

When his office flew people from Cincinnati and Milwaukie, Wis., to Baton Rouge last year to meet about the homicide audit and train law enforcement, Moore faced a family crisis that also contributes to his passion for BRAVE.

During the same time, Moore's father, Sgt. Hillar Moore Jr., was hospitalized and spent his last weeks alive.

Moore said his father's influence, especially in light of his death last November, helped light a fire in him, which he has applied to work.

"That's one of the biggest reasons I am where I am," he said, standing over stacks of research.

Moore said his father, a former Marine Corps sergeant, had his hands in everything, civically. When he wasn't busy running Associated Grocers, he was involved with organizations like Toys for Tots, Boys Scouts, Girl Scouts, and the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center.

The district attorney said his father told him and his seven siblings to take care of the least fortunate people. The crime victims, the people who live in neighborhoods where bullets fly daily and even the defendants who sit shacked in courtrooms fall in that category.

"That's not a traditional role of the DA's office, I guess," he said. "But when everything else fails, we catch them. We'd like to not (have to) catch them."

Moore said as his father lay in the hospital, he made the meetings with the Cincinnati researchers because it's what his father would have wanted him to do.

"Knowing that our BRAVE effort may have saved lives is a great feeling," he said.

"I wish he would have been here to see the end of this year," Moore said quickly and straightforward, using the same tone of urgency in which he talks about everything. "He always followed what was going on at the office."

For the least fortunate in Baton Rouge, Moore is making violence prevention his business, regardless of traditional prosecutor roles. Checking the time, he suddenly leaves the office and heads to his meeting: a round-table meeting with educators and law enforcement to discuss crime and truancy at the Family Youth Service Center.